Chesterfield Road, atop a steep hill in West Oakland, is home to dozens of Pitt students, longtime residents, UPMC employees, and, most notably, a highly localized population of hundreds of rats. Many things live there, including infestation.
Eloise Clark, who has lived in Chesterfield for 24 years, said she has seen this before.
“When I was younger and my kids were little, I lived a few houses away,” Clark said. “We had a rat problem at the time, but the city stepped in and got rid of the rats. Years later, I was back on the streets and it was the same rat problem.”
Clark recalled a night when various animals were fighting with rats on the street, and she could hear the voices coming from her home.
“This is not a small furry pet,” Clark said. “At night, you could hear the mouse and the cat fighting here. And you might think the cat would win, but it was the mouse who was winning.”
Clark said she believes the rat infestation was caused by certain student tenants mishandling trash. She called the mayor's office multiple times and asked them to put out food, but she received no response.
“There will be a few people who really don't care,” Clark said. “They throw trash everywhere and they don't care at all. I wish the city would step in and remove it like they did a few years ago. [the rats]”
Audrey Nagata, a second-year pharmacy major who has been living in Chesterfield since August, said the rats have changed the way she performs daily tasks such as taking out the trash.
“Sometimes when I take out the garbage, I kick it and stand there for a while because I'm afraid to pick it up,'' Nagata said. “Sometimes when I pick something up and walk around with it, I find that person inside and it's really scary.”
Like Clark, Nagata believes the cause of the epidemic is the huge amount of garbage that has accumulated.
“When we first came here, for some reason the garbage trucks didn't come to the street and the garbage remained there for about four weeks,” Nagata said.
According to Nagata and other residents, the conditions were the worst this fall due to heat and accumulation.
“For the first two months we were here, we could hear people trying to overturn trash cans at night,” Nagata said. “I live downstairs, so sometimes I just crawl on the trash outside the window,” Nagata said.
Nagata's landlord requires her to take out the trash and clean at set times, which she feels is helpful.
“I want people living on the streets, like landlords, to create stricter rules regarding how to store garbage,'' Nagata said.
Previous initiatives by the city have sought to address the massive piles of trash, including the annual Trash Olympics. last fall, according to Working with the City of Pittsburgh Department of Public Works, 482 volunteers collected 926 bags of trash across the city.
The department also recently announced changes to Pittsburgh's regular garbage and recycling collection schedule, according to . WPXI. To prevent recyclable materials from going to landfill, cardboard box collections will no longer take place during non-recycling weeks.
In response to these changes, some residents say the solution is to educate students about proper disposal rules. Clark said students should be “re-educated about how important it is to live in such close proximity.”
Auckland Planning and Development Corporation (OPDC) Initiative Educating students in Auckland about the proper disposal of trash and recycling. Volunteers went door-to-door across Oakland, distributing refrigerator magnets with QR codes that lead to student resource pages with collection schedules, disposal guides, and other resources.
Despite these efforts, accumulation remains a problem for students like Maggie Galvin, a sophomore majoring in media and professional communications, who regularly see “freshly run over rats.” There were many.
“[The trash accumulation was] When I first moved in, it was the worst,” Galvin said. “There was a lot of trash piled up from students who had just moved in.”
Leah Brush, Galvin's roommate and second-year biology major, said the city's collection schedule is the main problem.
“We pick up once a week and recycle once every two weeks, so it's hard to avoid. When you get a new bin, there's a hole in the bin,” Brush said.
Joseph Suzo, who has lived in Chesterfield for 15 years, also said the main problem is containing trash.
“The main issue is definitely containment,” Suzou said. “If a rat can't get to the trash can and there's nothing left to eat, it'll leave.”
Suzo built a fence around his front lawn to prevent rats from damaging trash cans or knocking them onto the street. Like many other residents, he suffers from rats destroying his property and eating canned food.
“If you take a regular trash can, you'll eat to the bottom,” Suzou said.
For those who don't have a barrier, Galvin says, “Once the rats get into the trash can, the trash is scattered on the sidewalk and just marinates and sits there.”
